Tweet-Parade (no.7 FEB 2012)
18/02/2012 | 5 Comments
It’s weekend! .. Time for a brand new Tweet-Parade! A Tweet-Parade is a post filled with the best articles and tutorials of last week’s blogosphere. It’s all about webdesign, graphic design, SEO, tutorials, social media and more. A broad scale of topics, but never-the-less the underlying focus is on Design.
Also I see this as my personal bookmarks of great articles from the Community of the last period. The different articles and post are categorized by their main topics. The best way to keep track of these tweets is simply to follow me on Twitter.
Webdesign Coding: CSS, HTML, Javascript, PhP, etc.
CSS3 ordered list styles - Styling ordered lists was always a tricky task and I’m not the only one who thinks that. To style numbers you need to remove default browser styles and add hooks to your lists elements in order to target them and style accordingly.
Progressive And Responsive Navigation - Start coding with a little forethought and apply the principles of progressive enhancement from the beginning and apply some responsive practices at the end, we can easily accommodate for less-capable browsers and reward those with modern browsers in both desktop and mobile environments.
Introducing CatsWhoCode code snippet library! - As a developer, I really like to collect code snippets that can be useful when needed. On CatsWhoCode, most popular posts are often the ones filled with lots of ready to use code snippets. This is why I decided to add a new feature ..
Scaling Web Page Elements Using The CSS3 Scale Transform - The scale transform requires only a single CSS declaration, but to ensure your pages work in the different CSS3 supporting browsers, you do need to add amended versions of the declaration to your code.
Callback Functions in JavaScript - In this post, which is based on what I’ve learned about callback functions, I’ll try to enlighten you on this fairly common JavaScript technique. But maybe you don’t fully understand how they work or how they’re implemented.
10 useful htaccess tricks to improve your website - For some reason, the .htaccess file is often overlooked by web designers. “A .htaccess (hypertext access) file is a directory-level configuration file supported by several web servers, that allows for decentralized management of web server configuration.”
Usability, User Experience, Responsive Webdesign, Mobile, etc.
Designing for touch - Fingers and thumbs turn desktop conventions on their head. Interaction designer Josh Clark explains what you need to keep in mind when designing for mobile touchscreens and compares finger-friendly touch interfaces for iPhone, iPad and Android
Usability Rules for Content Sites - Content sites, such as blogs, article directories, etc. are a major category of sites and if you haven’t designed such a site until now, you can be sure that sooner or later you will. Designing a content site is in many aspects easier than designing a corporate site but it has its specifics.
The responsive design process - This post was originally a document created for internal use at the design agency where I work, it’s intended to be understandable by people with more of a foot in the visual-design world than the technical world.
20 things every mobile developer should know - Before you get started you need to figure out what problem you’re trying to solve. Who will be using your app? Where will they be? How will they be using it? If they are engaged in an activity at the same time how does this affect your app?
Quick Tip: Don’t Forget the Viewport Meta Tag - If you read nothing else within this post, take one bit of advice away: if you’re designing flexibly, use the viewport meta tag in your <head>. In its basic form, it will set you up for cross-device layout peace of mind.
Responsive Design Tricks: Fluid Typography With CSS 3 - using a series of media queries and the new CSS 3 unit rem. The rem unit means ems relative to the root (the HTML) element. That means your type gets proportionally larger overall, rather than in relation to its ..
Better background images for responsive web design - We apply percentage-based widths to our img elements to get fluid images and this is a very good thing. But what about background images? Support for background-sizeis pretty abysmal right now, ..
A Responsive Experience - Not just the layout techniques Ethan gave name to and wrote the book on: fluid grids, plus media queries and flexible images, but taking a step back from that into the field of responsive architecture and abstracting that into responsive design in general.
10 Usability Guidelines for a Remarkable Website - When your SEO strategy pays off, you’ll have plenty of traffic at your website, but the next challenge is to help your visitors find the information they need. A website that neglects usability guidelines will fail to capture the ..
Why User Experience Is Critical To Customer Relationships - User experience is a priority that should, in some way, find a home within the design of any new-media strategy. With the explosion of social media and smart devices, customers are becoming incredibly ..
Keynotopia - Prototype Bootstrap-based apps using your favorite presentation tool. The following vector UI components have been designed from scratch in Apple Keynote, Microsoft PowerPoint and OpenOffice Impress, and are fully editable ..
Webdesign in Common, Web Typography, jQuery, Tools, etc.
50 Amazing jQuery Slider Plugins for Perfect Portfolio Website - To showcase your best work is by engaging the visitors with your design showcase. And implemented jquery image gallery and jquery slider on your portfolio website is the best way to achieve this.
What’s new for designers, February 2012 - The February edition of what’s new for web designers and developers includes new web apps, frameworks, jQuery plugins, WordPress tools, and some really great new fonts. Many of the resources below are free and are sure to be useful ..
How to Master the Design of Compelling Calls-to-Action - Once you have a strategy in mind for which calls-to-action you’ll feature on your website, you’ll probably start obsessing over their design. Here are some guidelines to master the design of successful calls-to-action.
15 Conversion Rate Optimisation Tips for Contact Pages - Once your visitors have found your contact page, it’s important to give them the information and options they require in order to make contact with you. Things you should try implementing on your page in order to..
22 Free and Premium HTML Responsive Website Templates and Layouts- The layout or templates that you have selected must have the flexibility to be used in big and small screens. They have maximum numbers of interesting features but at the same time they should not ..
When Will Web Typography Catch Up With Print - But in the last couple of years, with the adoption of most of css2 and a lot of css3 to the majority of browsers, faster internet connections for many users, and the death of some the legacy browsers holding css and html back, web ..
Building a High Performance Website - With the numerous techniques that can be used to increase site speed, project managers are constantly struggling with both technical and project management questions. Do you focus on front end or back end optimization?
Less is More: Fundamentals of Minimalist Web Design - Fighting the battle against clutter is something every designer undertakes, whether it’s on their own site or when designing for a client. Your web site’s design should enhance your site’s purpose by putting the focus ..
Field Guide for Web Applications - This field guide is designed to help you create great user experiences in your web apps. Whether you’re building your first web app, or are just looking for ways to improve existing experiences, there’s something here for you!
Developing a Color Scheme and Color Management Tips - In addition to finding and selecting colors that work for you, it is wise to develop and manage a color scheme for your project. It is simple to create a set of swatches in common ..
Graphic Design, Brand Identity, Typography, Print Design, etc.
The Rise and Fall of Famous Brands – Why Do They Fail? - It takes years to erect a successful brand identity, but only an instant to destroy it. All the famous brands and corporations have risen to their current status after a lot of painstaking effort. Failure is common for ..
How To Design a Great Magazine Cover – Simply Irresistible Tips - How do you judge a magazine? Do you flip through all the magazines to decide the One? Or do you possess some kind of divine knowledge that helps you choose the best of the best?
Quick Tip: Create an Emboss Effect Using the Appearance Panel - Illustrator doesn’t have a built-in emboss effect, but you can make one yourself, with few quick steps, using the Appearance panel. Then you can apply it to just about anything.
Logo Design Contests are Bad for Business - Businesses are starting to jump on the latest trend in logo design: the Logo Design Contest. Hosted by a third party, these contests offer a cash prize for the best logo submission. Designers follow a set of guidelines laid out by the ..
Do I Need a Brand? - Branding is important if you desire to build trust and instill loyalty. It covers everything from how you dress to how you respond on blogs written by other people. You begin to see why consistency is so important.
Set of 20 Tutorials and Articles of Negative Space - Negative/white space can dramatically improve you design and help them breathes more and has a much better flow. Negative space is just like a whitespace in web designs.
Blogging, Social Media, Writing, Content Strategy, etc.
22 Free Facebook Page Templates For Download - Following is a collection of 22 free Facebook page templates for download that are easy to apply. You just have to choose the one that has a desirable appearance and fill the text properly to make it attract more Facebook ..
Automatically Back Up Your Web Site Every Night - If you pay for web hosting in order to run any kind of web-based application—from your WordPress blog to a social media data archive—you need to back up your web server’s data the same way you back up your computer’s data.
Why Design Blogs Are Best At Creating A Viral Buzz! - Ironically, going viral on web is certainly a notorious act and very few people successfully accomplish this job. But despite all odd, with design blogs you can bank on the idea of viral marketing and create a buzz very easily.
How a Blog Helps SEO for a Lead Generation Website- More recently, blogs lost some of their Google luster, probably because so many people were taking advantage of tactics like I mentioned above. Today, however, blogs are making a comeback, in my view for three main reasons
How to Twitter and Facebook and Still Get Things Done - It almost seems like magic the way that most social media juggernauts tweet, update Facebook, upload YouTube videos and respond to comments, seemingly nonstop, all while still managing to get work done.
How To Use and Customize Your Facebook Timeline: Tips, Resources, Freebies - We all know that Facebook has launched a new look for its profiles called Timeline. Going back to F8 official presentation last autumn, the changes sounded amazing.
WordPress
Creating WordPress Themes with 20+ Tutorials; As Simple As That! - You can start it from the scratch and Creating WordPress Themes with 20+ Tutorials; As Simple As That! will help you out in that regard.
Find Which Plugins are Slowing Down your Site - If you’ve decided that your page speed is getting a little slow, it may be worth doing a little audit to get an idea of which of your plugins are adding the most to your site load time. And in true WordPress style, there’s a plugin for that.
7 Free Twitter Bootstrap Themes for WordPress - Bootstrap is a complete kit of HTML, CSS, and Javascript for some of the most common user interface components and interactions. It’s built on HTML5 and LESS and is now fully responsive, supporting a range of resolutions and devices.
Creating a custom WordPress theme options page - Whether you’re developing WordPress themes for yourself, for a client, or to sell commercially, having the ability to customize aspects of your theme via the WordPress control panel makes your theme infinitely flexible and many times more versatile and appealing.
Define Your Own WordPress Widgets - Widgets are small pieces of content that can be placed in one of the widgetized regions of your WordPress theme. A widget may contain some simple static content like a newsletter subscription form, introductory text, advertisements or some dynamic content such as a list of recent tweets from your Twitter account.
How to Include JavaScript and CSS in Your WordPress Themes and Plugins - Knowing the proper way to include JavaScript and CSS files in your WordPress themes and plugins is very important for designers and developers. If you don’t adhere to best practices, you run the ..
Common WordPress Issues and How to Solve Them - WordPress is easy to install and fun to work with, new users get excited with powerful features offered by many of its plugins and themes. Eventually they come across questions, issues and problems, asked by many before them.
The Best WordPress Starter Themes & Frameworks- Working with WordPress is a pleasure for a Web Developer but every WordPress project will contain a degree of repetition and common tasks. Creating a child theme and working with an existing free or premium WordPress ..
WordPress Functions.php Snippets - WPFunction lets you quickly build all the functionality you need for your next WordPress project!
Inside WordPress Actions And Filters - WordPress’ core has been carefully sprinkled with actions and filters that external code (in the form of themes and plugins) can hook into, injecting new functionality into the standard flow. The Plugin API provides a neat interface to work with actions and filters.
HTML5 WordPress Frameworks: 10 Best for Semantic WordPress Blog Building - To build a dynamic website powered by WordPress and HTML5, you need to choose a good HTML5 framework. This will simplify the process of building a semantic WordPress blog.
35 Awesome and Attractive WordPress Widgets For Bloggers - WordPress widgets is an easy and simple way to use for the bloggers, wordpress widgets display online visitors, comments, reports and more features on your site.
Search Engine Optimalization, Rankings, Analytics, Loadtime, etc.
Keyword Research: How You’re Doing It Wrong - We’re talking about all those little mistakes that can, and probably will, creep up in your keyword research at some point. Those seemingly trifling mistakes will kill your web development efforts, before you even figure out what went wrong.
How to Make Your Website Faster Than Speedy Gonzales - In this article I’ve just collected some of the tips you can do for your website without deteriorating your content, without affecting your website design in any matter and without changing your articles.
10 Advanced SEO Tactics That Will Increase Your Blog’s Traffic - Starting a blog is pretty simple. Actually getting people to visit it is hard. It’s not enough to just create great content and hope they will come… Because they won’t.
The 5 Most Valuable Places for Keywords on Your Website - Rather than trying to trick search engines into ranking your site higher, which often works against your rankings, focus on delivering more appropriate keywords in well-placed areas of your site code.
5 SEO Benefits of Guest Blogging – A SPN Exclusive Article - Guest blogging as part of a content marketing strategy should be a part of every website’s SEO campaign. Not only does guest blogging help with your website’s link building, ..
Tutorials
Making a Great jQuery Image Slider - I was on the Mac App Store yesterday and I couldn’t help but notice their very pretty image slider. It automatically slides down every so often, but once you interact, you can ‘push’ an image onto a larger canvas to display it.
Create liquid effects in Photoshop - In this tutorial you will learn how to create interesting, fluid elements using the Liquify filter. Using just a single image, you can create a whole variety of effects by pushing, pulling, rotating, reflecting, puckering and bloating any area as subtly or..
How to Build a Stylish CSS3 Search Box - A search box is probably one of the most common UI elements around. Whether it’s about a website or a web application, to increase user experience for it, you may want to add a stylish search box.
Now Fireworks isn’t Complicated For You - I have collected some brand new and unique types of Fireworks Tutorials from masters of Photoshop that can help you to make Firework using Photoshop , so get some inspiration for these Firework ..
Create a Ribbon DropDown Menu with CSS3 and jQuery - I’ll show you how to create a simple ribbon dropdown menu using CSS3 and jQuery. The menu is cross-browser compatible so it will be easy for you to adapt in your project.
Freelance, Business and Workflow Related Stuff
Do You Have a Thriving Business? Prioritize to Improve Productivity - It’s hard to deal with, actually, because you spend so much time learning how to launch your business and probably less on learning how to cope with it when it’s running like a fine-tuned engine.
Why Flexible Hours Inspire Performance - I’m relaxed about timekeeping in part because I had great bosses early in my broadcasting career. They trusted that, with a broadcast date in the schedule, any producer would work their socks off to make the best program on time.
A Dozen Tricks Used By Clients To Manipulate Freelancers - Since the dawn of time, mankind has tried to find ways to get people to do what they want. Sometimes they employ strong-arm tactics and sometimes they use deceit, but most of the time they use manipulation to bend ..
5 things you need to survive as a freelance creative - Being a freelance creative is living the dream right? You work for yourself, you choose your projects and you charge what you want…sounds too good to be true right? That’s because it is, at least in part.
8 tips for freelancing from home without ignoring your kids - Please keep in mind as you read, that whether I talk about kids, spouses, or significant others, it doesn’t matter. What really matters is balancing your home-work lifestyle. The object of this post is to help you balance ..
Who are You: Freelancer or Business Owner? - As a business entity, there’s really no difference, legally-speaking, whether you consider yourself a freelancer or business owner. Yet, the distinction is an important one to make, not only to determine who your target client will be, ..
How To Determine What Your Clients Really Want - The world of freelancing is host to many complicated skillsets. Artists and graphic designers are constantly trying to match their talents with the numerous demands pouring out from clients. Project work can be exhilarating, ..
12 Things I Have Learned After 7 Years of Freelancing - Here I am, almost 7 years later and I wish I knew a lot more about this field rather than learning just by my own mistakes. The crazy thing is that success is not (just) about coding skills alone. You have to build a whole environment to compensate the instability that you probably won’t face in a regular job.
14 Questions To Ask Your Clients Before and After a Project - Getting to know your client is an important part of determining if you’re a right fit for the project. Not only that, but you should always ask questions before-hand to compile information that you will later use to ..
A Year In Review: 11 Things I Learned From Freelancer to Agency Owner - I’ve spent the last 10+ years freelancing and bouncing back through different agencies. While there were plenty of perks both working for yourself and in an agency atmosphere, It always felt like something was missing.
Stop Writing Project Proposals - A few years back, we decided to try something new. A potential client approached us and rather than preparing another project proposal, we offered the client what we now call a “Project Evaluation.”
F*cking Brilliant, a great Read or just magnificent Tips!
How Good Designers Think - Good designers aim to move beyond what you get from simply asking consumers what they need and want. First of all because they understand that most people when asked don’t say what they mean or mean what they say, but also because people often don’t know.
Every Time You Call a Proprietary Feature “CSS3,” a Kitten Dies - Any -webkit- feature that doesn’t exist in a specification (not even an Editor’s draft) is not CSS3. Yes, they are commonly evangelized as such, but they are not part of CSS at all. This distinction is not nitpicking.
To Speed Up The Creative Process, Slow Down - When we think about eureka moments Rodin’s The Thinker comes to mind, maybe Newton’s famous apple inspired insight (as the story goes). We associate insights with deep concentration and contemplation.
Solving problems efficiently through design - Are we solving interaction and user problems? Are we ,as Mike Monteiro said on this very site, “choosing better problems to solve”? Or are we fooling ourselves into believing that design is mere knowledge of gradients and drop shadows?
I hope you have enjoyed these hand-picked great articles? Please let me know by sharing your opinion in the comments-section. Did we miss a great article, please let us know .. To keep up to date with all the cool links, simply follow me @gonzodesign
These are so nice article. all the points are very useful for the designer, i appreciate this article. n gonna useful to me also
thanks for all this Great!!
Hi Logo Designs,
Glad you found it useful! Every Saturday you can keep yourself up-to-date with the best Articles and Tutorials of the previous week.
Thanks for your comment, Cheers & Ciao ..
I seriously love your site.. Great colors & theme.
Did you make this amazing site yourself? Please reply back as I’m planning to create my own site and would like to find out where you got this from or what the theme is named. Thank you!
Hi Pit 37 druk,
Thanks for your kind words! Yep, I made this site from scratch, as we speak I’m tuning the portfolio part! Finally have a bit time, in between client projects, to make a custom post type for my projects, yay! Have a great weekend buddy, cheers & ciao!